Weekender XLBS: Crusading With Tiny Fighting Men!
January 19, 2020 by crew
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Happy Sunday,
I like the idea of physical golden button award!, but I would prefer an actual button-like award or large coin or medal.
Somthing like this in essence (not necessarily form) – https://www.etsy.com/listing/679154803/italian-coin-collection-italian-lira?ref=landingpage_similar_listing_top-1
Best regards,
NR
I’d get a pin!
Happy Sunday!!
Sorry I’m late, I was finishing Season 4 of The Expanse with the wife and well… y’know…priorities. 🙂
Just finished Season 3 – I hope Season 4 is just as good!
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. People continue to be The Worst. 🙂
Happy Sunday COGS, Golden Button – if I would won I would say pass on physical reward as I would have no space for it.
@warzan, you should look at the ingredients of those liquorice coins. I believe you’ll find salmiak, or ammonium chloride. Yummy.
We can’t it’s all in danish..also I’ve eaten them all 🙂
Salmiak is Proper Foreign though. Your guarantee of salty joy!
For rulesets for the crusades you could use Gerrys Liquorice to simulate the seige.To represent each day of the seige each player eats a handful of Liquorice and the last person to get dysentery wins
I did read some where recently of a Crusades version of Lion rampant coming out. I think it’s a fan version but will have army lists specifically for the crusades
I think the walls need to be higher. At the seige of Jerusalem the crusaders after dismantling boats and scouring the country found enough wood for 2 50 foot tall seige towers
Not a fan version. It’s being written in conjunction with the university of Edinburgh. I spoke to the professor at salute last year about it.
Oh ok. I only saw the cover art and some blurb on it
should be out for Salute
Beetroot @avernos – the moomin black liquirice was garlic, vinegar, chili and beetroot. It was the best for sure
Everything but the beetroot sounds amazing!
Happy Sunday!
Personally, if I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Golden Button, the Kudos and online badge is almost sufficient, but I’d also expect to be showered with lots of small golden gifts… no idea what we’d call that though.
Good morning CoG’ers! Fantastic show gentlemen, as always you brighten my Sunday’s with your positivity and humour and area a joy to watch whilst I hobby. I would love a Golden Button physical award, especially if it is personalised somehow, it would be something that would have pride of place in my hobby space.
I am really enjoying Gerry’s hobby progress updates, I really like the Mantic Ogre army and am really enjoying seeing his progress, please can we have a KoW battle report? (Yes, I will keep asking until we get one!) Have a great day everyone.
That sounds educational and sexy. I approve.
Double Castle Wall @warzan
Liquorice is amazeballs. Also meant to be good for your stomach… though maybe not in the qualities that Gerry has been eating.
I ate it in those quantities once in the olden days. Lodger and his missus came home and I had to excuse myself.
Ok for rules for Warren . How about a conversion of the old Standard Games Outremer/Cry Havoc ruleset. Troops are either fresh/wounded or dead. Game was really quick to play
You know there is something about walls and siege towers that really gets my juices flowing,… the ‘only flower of my heart” believes that it is because I have this as a metaphor for my love life ….(honestly that woman!!) in reality it is becasuse I love David Gemmel’s “Legend”
I shall not live to see Geddon
The wall of Death… well named as it turns out ….I love that book
…. but in all seriousness if you do live to see Geddon, Abbott Avernos, whatever you do, DON’T fall back to the keep.
On the subject of physical golden buttons.
I know some people like having things like that but I for one would rather use the space to put more of my minis.
I am also not posting my photos with the idea of getting any prices anyway.
Gerry stick with the original rules for Necromunda, the “new” ones are a complete mess. Not only are there 7 Hardback books to buy for the rules, there’s over 200 gang tactics cards (although these are OOP, but if your opponent has them and you don’t he has a great advantage over the 7 to 8 cards GW has made available as a PDF).
The new gangs have massive balance issues (notably the Van Saar gang that’s so overpowered even Van Saar players are admitting the rules for them are broken), GW proofreading gets worse (to the point where they can’t keep the stats consistent for a weapon IN THE SAME BOOK), and basically the whole game suffers from massive “rules bloat” as GW pad out the hardback books that they release with every new gang when a couple of pages in white dwarf would have done.
There’s a community version of the old rules over on YakTribe that’s far more playable than these new rules (and we’ve been using that). Just “don’t go there” with the new Necromunda rules as you’ll just end up scratching your head, leafing through seven rule books during the game, and getting shot up by Van Saar gangs (who hit on a 2+ right out the gate).
Basically it can all be summed up with the following slogan “Go Retro with your Necro” 😀
Happy Sunday folks, another good show to watch. Very interesting for the crusades but I ain’t got a clue for rule sets so I can’t help there, but I am interested in how you figure it out.
@warzan a quick search on Google shows that between 1000ad to 1200ad six sided dice were certainly around for gaming. Playing cards from China and Asia were a set of 21 cards with the number variations from a 2d6 roll the modern playing card layout of 4 suits and face cards seems to be a thing from 1300-1400s so a bit later.
If you really want to know my feelings on 3D printing, ask Gerry or Paul… while Warren may have missed by 3D printing rant yesterday at OTT headquarters, they didn’t – got it out of my system so didn’t quite “lose my shit” this morning watching the show…
But remember everytime you 3D print something another greenstuff puppy gets crushed by your fancy, modern bullshit 🙂
What ever your rant was I probably agree. In 5 years I have no doubt people will be saying 3d printing? That was so last decade?! ‘xxxx’ will change gaming
I hate greenstuff puppies … so this makes me want to get a 3D printer even more 😀
(am I evil ? ;-))
Happy Sunday all!
I too like the idea of a physical Golden Button award! Perhaps only available around the end of year awards time as then you only need to worry about making them at one certain time. Would certainly be very cool to hang on the wall around hobby areas or game rooms!
Right back to painting 🙂
What? Sunday already?
Help Justin out lads STOP FKN SWEARING!
Did Justin just give up on editing out the swearing? Not that it bothers me but I saw several arm waves that didn’t correlate to any beeping be used (ok maybe one arm wave). Great to see Warrens excitement for this crusades game, but sadly all I feel when looking at it is “wouldn’t that just look better in 28mm”, I’ve just never been able to reprogram my brain to approach a smaller scale, I know all the arguments for it I just don’t feel anything for it. There’s still too many Necromunda books for sure, but I think that actually it’s all been condensed now so instead of the rules spanning 16 separate books they now live in about 4, could be less, but it’s still more than 1 . . . I look forward to Necromunda from here on out, with all the standard gangs covered the more off the wall ones are surely next in line. We’ve already got arbites and corpse grinders, and it looks like water guild is well in hand, no doubt we’ll see old faithfuls such as scavvies, redemptionists, ratskins, maybe they’ll even explore the ash wastes in the future, but as well as that they’ve said they think they might explore stuff from the original confrontation setting (I pretty sure that’s what it was called though I could be getting mixed up). Admittedly I’m less of a gamer these days but I unlike warren enjoy Necromunda, and unlike Gerry I like the new models, as well as the old. A week or so ago you talked about how difficult it is to introduce a new army, and how Tau would be a backdoor way of doing this, Tau introduced Kroot then in White Dwarf we get a full Kroot army, tau introduced Vespid maybe we get a breakaway faction etc. The way I see it is 40k is only able to support so many factions, yes it would be cool to see 100 different unique factions or armies on the table but maintaining a product line for that would be impossible, so things like Necromunda, Inquisitor, blackstone fortress at least give us a flavour of what is there in the wider universe.
I think that the reward is a nice idea but not for me. It might be worth putting a survey into the next cog release to get an opinion poll out there. I think they would be great for the yearly awards to maybe use them for the top three Golden Buttons fo the year though. It would give them much more prestige.
@warzan I would love to come and play with your 15mm bits buddy, I may need to borrow your painting glasses though 🙂
I think the golden button thing is find the way it is. Nice and casual.Shouldnt be a competition with physical prizes
Yup.
Happy Sunday! Warhammer Ancient Battles and Lord of the Rings have some siege rulesets I believe…been a long time since I looked at any. Classic Hack and DBMM perhaps, Tactica Medieval if you can find it. I imagine Gerry has access to most since he pointed me to a clean copy of WAB.
@warzan Might I ask, where did the magnificent walls come from? You printed those at your shop? I have some more fantasy medieval walls and such…but for a crusader siege those are incredible. The whole table is glorious…but you might need a few more war machines, Warren. Maybe autocannons and lascannons in those towers too, would be nice to deal with Crusader siege towers and Uruk-hai carrying black powder bombs to your gates…and I can still see some sand showing through the war machines. Definitely need more. I fear what would become of me if I bought a nice 3D printer. I would definitely have to knock out a wall to my office and add on to house the device and all the lunatic resin stuff I would make.
@avernos I would second a Let’s Play KoW III between you and Justin. You seem to have grabbed on to the ruleset if you’re painting up ogres. I never cared for Mantic scale, especially after I gave boxes of their elves to the grandsons. The boys love the Warlords of Erehwon ruleset that give the treacherous elves spangly armor and track shoes, but my 8th ed. Chaos warriors and marauders just tower over the Mantic stuff, so I built a gnoll army for elven archers and cavalry to murder…go figure. Once again the poor lads find themselves in a cabinet. I think the nearest 9th Age players are across the Atlantic.
PS Eating furry licorice seems a good way to become a real hellmouth, I would think
I’ve been playing KoW since first, it is probably my favourite fantasy game/favourite game fullstop.
The elves are a love hate thing for people, they’re more like the D&D elves in scale, not towering over humans, but the other ranges are comparable to old GW fantasy minis. Although not to the sigmarine stuff that they fire out now that tower over everything.
If it wasn’t for the ETC I think The 9th Age would be as dead as plaid, I do like Erehwon, but it’s a very different game from rank and flank
Is plaid dead? Dang it, missed another fashion trend. I guess I need to clean out my closet, but then all I will have is turtlenecks…the livestock never complained about the plaid, so how was I to know?
I thought about retiring a few years ago, but after play KoWII in a couple of the neighboring states, I figured I enjoyed rolling out hay to hungry livestock during a blizzard more than driving 4 hours to play KoWII. I can’t really say why…maybe the flying circus or almost titans, or Warhammer hangover. I have piles of KoW bases (they work fine for Dragon Rampant) and I bought the two main books…so maybe I will give it a go. I need more northern miniatures like I need a hole in the head, but I like the Northern Alliance…a lot. Having a pile of grandsons and adopted grandsons who love this stuff…even spend their own chore money on it…so why not? For me real weapons are way more interesting and useful than plastic ones, but people who live where lots of hungry predators are after your livestock winter and summer tend to think that way.
My enjoyment of Hail Caesar and Clash of Spears, history and historical wargaming really caught me by surprise. I am enjoying that aspect of the hobby, especially researching the battles and building the armies. That is the beauty of this hobby…something for everyone. I can amuse myself with history, and entertain the grandchildren with dragons.
I’m really looking forward to getting Clash next month and throwing my greeks out onto the table.
I do hope warzan has blocked in some time for painting 15mm figs. Perhaps 3 to 4 years.
Where will they stand? Is he adding platforms to the war machines?
Aye he’s planning on group basing them
The figs are painted already. Only need to splash colour on the war machines he has added
It should be epic, if anyone survives the first volley from the artillery ;)>
a lot of counter battery fire back and forth I’m guessing
Happy Sunday! Thank you for the Golden Button. I would probably pay for a physical award, just to have it by my painting desk. Can I pay with Finnish liquorice?
On the rule system for the crusades game. I know it’s a bit marmite, but I’d have a go with Hail Caesar. I’ve had most fun playing large and casual multiplayer games with rulesets from Hail Caesar / Black Powder family.
Happy Sunday, and thanks for the show.
and suddenly Gerry becomes captain Ahab?
It’s an anagram for Capt Baah
I always have been 🙂
I spent 10 years searching for the white whale of colonial skirmish rules for the drift and napoleonics have been somewhere in the North Sea for over 20. But I’ll land them
the golden buttons look good.
the walls look great can you not get a small pad length to widen the walkways? @warzan
a fab xlbs.
Siege of Acre would be a good scenario
I’m not too interested in a physical Golden Button award but I would like to have the number of Golden Buttons I’ve earned display on my forum posts.
Two historical sieges worth looking at are Alesia and Vienna.
At Alesia, Caesar had trapped Vercengtorix, a Gallic leader, in Alesia. Caesar built two walls. The fist
surrounded the town and faced inward toward the town. The second wall faced outward because Caesar knew a
Gallic Force was going to try and lift the siege. I’ve
heard this battle described as a tactical doughnut
because you have an expanding center and a
contracting perimeter where the forces in Alesia are
trying to break out and the relieving force is trying to
break in. Things are tough for the Romans but things aren’t peachy for the Gauls. The two forces can’t communicate and thus cannot coordinate their attacks. So the forces in the besieged town don’t know if they are seeing the main attack by their friends, or a feint.
The other siege worth taking a look at is the siege of Vienna. The Ottomans are besieging the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna and are digging a mine to undermine the walls. The Ottomans backs are to a steep wooded mountain. A relieving Polish Army has climbed up the backside of the mountain, considered to be an impossible task, and sweeps down from the mountainside into the Ottoman rear just as the Ottomans are about to break into Vienna. This is the famous battle where the Polish Winged Hussars made what was possibly the largest cavalry charge in history.
Really dissapointed with Justins failure to come to grips with the Mutunus Putunus army . I suggest you give him a performance review to keep his job.Not to mention the fact i suspect he alpha striked me by not passing on my details to Mantic as a winner of shadows in the north KOW 2 player stater set .
I took care of the KoW winners myself so it was sent to Rob although it was the last claimed. Let me chase it up for you, nobody should be without Kings 🙂
Thx Gerry that would awesome of you to do so .
Yeah @avernos you have gotten confused about the Gang War books and the newer hardback books.
The new core book is rules for 2d and 3d.
The new Gangs of Underhive have all 6 core gangs plus core campaign.
Book of Peril – Venator gang all the weird terrain and new parts of the campaign.
Book of Law – Enforcers and new campaign type
Book of Ruin – Chaos Cult, Corpse Grinders, Genestealer Cult, plus rules of Uprising Campaigns.
The Dark Uprising book has Enforcers and Corpse Grinder rules plus Uprising campaign rules.
not gotten confused by anything, when the initial rules were released they only had rules for 2D movement, then they added additional rules and gangs, now that after people have bought into those they have released hardbacks compiling them I feel that’s a massive Fuck You to anyone who wanted to play those gangs or types of games from the start. Otherwise they should have released them simultaneously.
I know why they’re doing it, it’s a business, but the manner in which they release part work rules has put me off ever exploring whatever their plans may be for Necromunda.
Your gripe is valid, but the fact is people starting out can now get all the rules for all the gangs in one book straight out.
Plus while the rules were compiled into one book, not all gangs were available to buy from the outset when Necromunda was first release the first time round. So there is an argument there not to present rules for models that are not available to buy.
Anyway, in terms of rules nuMunda I think is a vast improvement (no games where entire gangs go into overwatch) plus lots and lots of options (more than the original).
I love the original game and played a lot of it and assumed that the new version wouldn’t meet my nostalgic expectations but I really enjoyed it. I didn’t think I’d like the different gangs starting with different stats either (I like the idea of everyone starting the same and specialising during play) but again, I’ve enjoyed them.
I wasn’t a fan of the way it was released, and remain seriously unimpressed with the inability to buy gang-specific tactics cards (how hard is it to reprint cardboard?), but I do think the new version is a seriously good take on what was a great game but would be quite dated now.
I think you underestimate the scheduling of the printers that GW outsources to, and the balance they need to get between printing enough (and forming minimum orders) and printing too many and have stock stuck on shelves.
I’ll step.into this one. Its planned scarcity pure and simple. Printing production is one of the cheapest and most efficient forms of production in existence. If they wanted stock available, it would be there 🙂
While printing is cheap, given GW outsources printing, has to consider SKUs on the shelves/warehouses, and everything else they are printing, I think the biggest factor is scheduling.
In an ideal world a company would want to give product to everyone wanting it, but when you have space to manage for stock, scheduling future printing of other stock, contracts meaning minimum orders are required for print runs, I think cost in terms of raw material is the least important factor, and scarcity is the last thing they want (because scarcity is what leads people to leaving a game/buying proxies).
@doctorether – I gather that the initial distribution of rules across multiple books and releases was as much cock-up as conspiracy, due to scheduling the printing well before they had decided what they were going to release when.
They have rectified this with the compendium rules and gang books, so although I bought the slim soft backs, I’m happy that they did the right thing.
I don’t think there’s an excuse for the gang cards though. I mean, I guess they don’t bother because they don’t think they’d make enough return on them to be worth the hassle, but it’s a real kick in the teeth for players. It can’t be that expensive to print some extra cards. They could do them print on demand. They could release them electronically. They could do an annual ‘register if you’d like a reprint of an out of print set’, etc.
Very little is really ‘essential’ but the tactics cards are a part of the game and one that they continue to push. It’s not like they’re from a previous edition of a game. They really ought to make this part of the game available to new players and older ones who missed out on getting them when they came out.
Like I have said the issue is less cost of printing and more scheduling of print runs, skus and distribution. Now yes, print on demand is an option, but that would likely push the cost of the cards up by 50% or more (depending on the amount and size of the cards because when you go past non standard specifications that also adds to the cost) . Don’t get me wrong it is very annoying. Heck some gangs don’t even have faction specific cards (Genestealer Cult for example).
Chris were talking about a global multinational here with some of the most sophisticated warehousing technology in Europe, not a start up or SME.
Yet nearly every major launch of that last 2 years has been under produced.
If it’s not deliberate then it’s got to be somthing going wrong in the business, yet it happens repeatedly is it really incompetence? (they are a well run business so I’m not convinced, and the margins are so high on the product that they can afford to scrap non sellers and still make more by meeting demand – unless FOMO is part of the strategy)
There is a absolutely no excuse for the cards, just none, they are cheap to manufacture, already in the systems (skus) can be printed anywhere in the world, dont take up much storage space etc.
Re the awards, reminded me of a series of emails my boss got saying he had won such and such of a year and for £5-600 he could have an engraved glass plaque and have his name in lights.
After a series of these we bought him one of ballroom dancers and labelled it “Company Name” – CFO of the year). Was tempted to get him one i bronze or silver just for funsies!
The award sounds like an interesting idea. At Irregular magazine, used to give a small trophy to our monthly painting challenge winners. They were well received, everyone who won quite liked getting a small award.
How about making the golden button a physical button (a pin)?
Is there a way to get an RRS feed of the XLBS show? I’d love to listen on the podcast version, but I’m too lazy not to get it in my Apple podcast app automatically to be honest..
@warzan, for rules, Sage Age of Magic with less magic and the crusader boards?
Also Mantlets for the crusaders to hide behind
I like the idea of the golden button award but probably wouldn’t part with my own money for one. (In the unlikely event I ever won one!)
Challenge for next weekend; no 3d printer talk. 😉
Well i’m a week behind.
for you crusades game why not use chess pieces for you activation system be they on cards or pinched from a travel set,
magnetic travel set(s)
stick all the pieces in a dice bag
your only issue i can see is that most sieges are protracted affairs unless walls are low enough for an escalade
acre might be a doable setting, crusaders take the city in scenario 1, defend scenario 2 and in 3 the monastic orders need to flee with their relics
Loving the smaller scale minis on round bases. Im with you Warren, its all about how it looks. And the square/rectngle bases just dont look good small scale. I would love to see how you base the small scale minis and hide the pudding base of the minis. I’ve got an order from Pendraken in the post and im gonna base them on rounds!